>> iow, IF there were half a BILLION Botswanans in the world, which of course there are NOT, not a SINGLE one of them would have scored 784 and thus demonstrated an IQ of 132.

This habit of developing conversion constants for going between testsseems awfully "iffy" to me, like comparing apples and oranges. I knowthe theoreticians claim there's a ghostly "g factor" behind all thesenumbers.

I know that was / is done for the SAT at some point, to where I wasinvited to join Mensa based on high SAT scores.

The SAT is a measure of scholastic aptitude, meaning it measuresskills (like reading comprehension skills) specific to a particularway of life, a subculture. It doesn't advertise itself as a test forassessing basic smarts (whatever that means).

I know you're talking about the TIMMS, not the SAT, but you're doingthe same thing some do with SAT scores: applying some imaginedconversion constant.

The author notes how large (nation-sized) population groups, such asthe Irish, have shifted their IQs in the positive direction (whichwould be "to the right" in our right-biased culture -- unless lookingfrom the other side of the graph), and done so in far shorter timethan any genetic explanation could reasonably account for.

Check back with Botswana in 30 years or so.

Lets also remember that global IQ has been rising in ways the testsdon't show because they're recalibrated to keep 100 at the center oftoday's bell curve.

The hypothesis that dense urbanization has a lot to do with thesechanges in score makes sense to me, though I'd add access toconventional scholastic curricula, Internet bandwidth, free time tostudy and explore topics, time to play games (both on-line and withothers).

Imagine sitting for a TIMMS and/or IQ test in circumstances such as this:

Talk about apples and oranges (incomparable circumstances). If Iconnect the Irish and Botswana cases, I'd be led to the hypothesisthat "hope" is a chief indicator. Life in Ireland has seemed lesshopeless of late.

This passage from Wikipedia is probably known to you already, sinceyou're up on this literature:

"...the concept of race as a meaningful category of analysis is hotlycontested. The authors of two articles in two encyclopedias, theEncyclopædia Britannica and the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity andSociety, argue that today the mainstream view is that race is a socialconstruction that is based not mainly in actual biological differencesbut rather on folk ideologies that construct groups based on socialdisparities and superficial physical characteristics.[39][40]Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) state that the overwhelmingportion of the literature correlating race with identity has tacitlyadopted folk definitions of race.[38] The American AnthropologicalAssociation in 1998 published a "Statement on 'Race'" which rejectedthe existence of "races" as unambiguous, clearly demarcated,biologically distinct groups.[34] Others argue that this view isrestricted to certain fields, while in other fields, race is stillseen as a valid biological category.[41]"